My week didn’t really work out as planned. That’s life. Today’s a gorgeous anomaly of sun and warm temperatures before we dip back to unseasonal coolness again tomorrow, so you KNOW I have a huge bike ride on tap this afternoon, coupled with plans for some photography.

I just wanted to post a quick something here, feeling pretty moved by this really tragic story I found on BBC.

Long story short: A female Italian artist decided she and her friend would try to bring a message of peace to everyone by hitchhiking dressed as brides to the Middle East. The two women got separated, and one has now been found murdered. So much for the cause of peace.

One of the victim’s devastated sisters had this comment to make, “Her travels were for an artistic performance and to give a message of peace and of trust, but not everyone deserves trust.”

I guess that’s something I see wrong with a lot of women today — too trusting at the wrong times.

There are times for trust and times for skepticism, and engaging in skepticism does not mean you’re a bad person, it means you’re protecting yourself against chance.

I don’t care if this “trust” is as dangerous as hitching for rides in the Middle East, or just choosing to have sex with a “nice” guy sans a condom.

I’ve had a story sitting in my email inbox for a couple weeks because I’ve not wanted to confront the depressing reality I’d need to tap into in order to do it justice, but it’s largely about how their is a STARTLING ascent in the transmission of sexual diseases with young women. What the fuck are you girls thinking? CONDOMS! If men say no to wearing them, YOU HAVE A REASON TO BE SCARED. I don’t give a fuck what his reason is — wearing a condom should absolutely be mandatory. I mean, come on! Okay, that’s another posting for another time, but you see that it clearly inspires some rage in me…

Tangent aside, this all goes to the same troubling thing: the wanting to be able to trust everyone.

You cannot trust everyone. It’d be nice. But there are very, very bad people in the world. Crimes will always happen, people will always be murdered, poverty will always exist. That’s just what the human condition entails. We will never solve everything, we’ll never genetically-engineer “nice, trustworthy” people, we’ll never conquer violence against each other. We can sure try, but I doubt we’ll ever succeed.

Trust can’t be randomly assigned. You cannot trust people you don’t know. You cannot trust people you have no history with. Trust must be gained or earned. As you get to know someone, you develop instincts. You must learn whether your instincts can be trusted or not. I can trust my instincts about 80-90% of the time, and I’ve learned that from years of judging it.

We need to live cautiously. We need to expect that the worst can happen. We need to understand that any situation can go from safe to horror in five minutes or less. And we need to believe that, even though we live with all these safeguards, there will always be people who surprise us and inspire us to continue taking the chance on trusting others…

…Just not blindly, like this poor, now-dead woman did.

Trusting others is a difficult thing to do, and we’re often wrong in the assigning of trust and faith to those others, but we need to keep trying because there will always be moments when trusting is the threshold to great, great experiences. Trust is hard to give, challenging to keep, but a terrible thing to live without.

Like I say, though, in a big ol’ world of wonder that also happens to be filled with STDs, automatic weapons, and violent people, the giving of trust can’t be done blindly. People’s faces have nothing to do with what lurks behind their eyes, and some of what’s lurking, none of us ever want to experience.

I guess there’s no happy way to end this posting other than to say, be wary of who you trust. They’re call “strangers” for a reason. Embrace skepticism, then allow yourself to trust when the time is right.

So, uh, happy weekend?

(This is a weird long posting. We’re going on a ride.)

Carrie Underwood just did a cover of George Michael’s Praying for Time for Idol Gives Back.

Well, I’ve neglected to share that GayBoy snagged us some GM tickets for the upcoming tour when it hits Vancouver. We don’t have great seats, but the day for me paying $200 to see anyone, God included, is still not even fucking close to nigh. Not when I can pay $12 and get sweaty, up close, and personal with dirty rock people in small clubs for insane shows that feel like the best kept secret in town.

Still, it’s George Michael. George got me through my folks’ divorce and my mothers suicide attempt. His Songs from the Last Century got me through the first year after her death.

I saw him live the last time he rolled through Vancouver, 1991, when I was just graduating high school. Old times. Killer gig. (His Cover to Cover tour where he performed only covers, none of his own work — pissed off the record company but it was awesome to get to dance to Superstition and Play That Funky Music [White Boy] ).

George is in a weird place. Mocked, derided, taunted for his escapades in Beverly Hills washrooms and getting arrested for pot. The older I get, the more I like the guy, though. He’s human after all.

People fuck up. God knows if I was famous for the last eight years and cameras had followed me around everywhere, I’d certainly be trying to live it down the rest of my life. I’ve been a complete ass sometimes. I don’t even want to get into some of the bullshit I’ve brought to life over the years. Suffice to say, I do not have cameras following me and have managed to get past most of my own stupidity, but the road was real fucking long, hard, and bumpy.

It’s part of why I can’t stand this obsession we have with celebrities. Constantly hounding them, haunting them, hurting them. Sure, they sign up for fame, but, really, would anyone ever really want to willfully submit to so much ridicule and analysis from others? Get real. Why should they carry those burdens just because they’ve had some success?

I feel badly for anyone enduring hard times, celebrity or not. I don’t think having money or fame makes anyone immune from hurt, shame, or resentment.

I often wonder what it is that drives us as a society to be so obsessed in this cult of celebrity. My thinking is somewhat subject to historical interpretation, though. (Bear with me for a crash history of the modern media.)

I figure that, before the media really began at the end of the 18th century — by media, I mean press and news in its original form, pure print and word on the street — it was easy to maintain a certain mystique when one was wealthy or famous. People might hear a bit about you here or there, but if you were a celebrity before about 1890 or so, you could effectively limit what the world saw or knew of you, and without a spin doctor eating 10% of your income.

But then… Better print technology meant more papers could be produced, bigger ones, so more content was possible. More competition was born, and suddenly newspapers had become bigger business. We entered a society of mass production, so advertising became more important because more things had to be sold. To sell more advertisements, they’d make more content, have more stories ergo more pages for ads. More content meant more paper, and more paper meant more costs, like ink, and running presses markedly longer. So they needed to sell more papers. Needing to sell more, content and sensationalism became important. When the news mattered, papers would sell themselves. But day to day, “hooks” became more important. Stories with appeal. And celebrities have appeal.

Long story short, celebrities were good for business. But then technology improved. The portable television camera, right up through to camera phones. Every bit of technology has made that access more possible, so the stories have become increasingly invasive as a result.

Well, now that we can see all the nitty-gritty about these rich, famous people’s lives, the mystique of wealth and fame has begun to erode, and suddenly the monotone of our lives seems so much less sucky because their lives suck too.

And I resent our tendency to submit to that, on a lot of levels. Whether it’s because I think we’re a big world with a lot of serious problems that need serious solutions and these vapid stories take away from that discussion, or that I just get bored by it all, I do know we can do much, much better than reading the latest story about how celebrity X fucked up with Y.

In keeping with this sentiment, I really try to avoid reading more sensational celebrity news. Someone talking about a movie is one thing, but there are limits, and I try to abide them.

I guiltily confess, though, that I’ve followed George Michael’s crazy happenings to a degree. But right around when my mother died, he’d lost his mother (and a lover) as well. He had an off-the-hook pot habit, was fucking up in a million ways. So did I, so did I, and so was I. A lot of his lyrics have always cut a little close to home with my own life experience. And, yes, knowing he was human and was fucking up made me feel a little bit less alone as what I perceived to be a failure, you know? But I know that was my motivation, and I’m honest about it.

(And he puts on one hell of a concert. It’s all the way off in July, but it’ll be great.)

As usual, total queen of the segue there, but it’s all about going with the flow. Writing’s a great ride some nights. 🙂

PS: But I have a lot of disrespect for GM refusing to take an HIV test. I think it’s irresponsible of anyone to not have an HIV test. In this day and age, anyone sexually active — married, in a relationship or not — should be tested annually at the very least.

A big-wig in the world of Formula One Racing (the chief, actually) named Max Mosley’s at the centre of a sex scandal involving S&M and role-playing revolving around Nazi scenarios. Here’s a snippet from TIME.com:

Last Sunday the British tabloid News of the World posted video footage on its website of Mosley and five prostitutes in what it frothily described as “a depraved Nazi-style orgy in a torture dungeon.” In the secretly filmed video, the paper reports, Mosley “barks orders in German as he whips two hookers dressed in striped uniforms reminiscent of Auschwitz garb while girls in Nazi uniforms look on.”

Wow. Where do you start, eh?

It gets better. Turns out that his daddy dearest was the leader of the British Fascists back in the pre-war years and both pops and Mosley’s mummy much touted both Hitler and Mussolini as visionaries. Hitler was even a guest at their wedding, which was given by Goebbels.

Yeah. Holy doozie, Batman. Achtung!

I have some strong opinions about the Holocaust…* (Read the footnote for more.) But you have to be a fucking moron to be sympathetic to the Nazis.

There will be people who say that it’s simply acting out a sexual fantasy. It’s not really bad, it’s just play-acting. Yeah, well, some fantasies are left better unplayed. Especially if you have a political sort of career where this shit can come back to bite you.

The guy’s a fucking idiot. I don’t give a shit about the S&M. That’s fine, but pretending they’re a couple Jewish whores in Auschwitz uniforms as he cracks the whip with threats of whatever the fuck… And spectator girls in Nazi unis? It’s a little sordid. Throw his parents’ support for Hitler into the mix, that the Fuhrer was even a guest of his folks, and, yes, he should be made an example of.

I have a lot of issues with the way the media handles the whole Holocaust/Hitler thing, and it’s been bubbling up for me of late, so I really need to dial myself back here, but let me just say this:

The media portrays Hitler as a meglomaniacal paranoid nutbag with a knack for oppressing and exterminating minorities, like what he accomplished could have been done by any whackjob…

And that is a very, very dangerous assumption. Hitler was not insane. He was evil. He was an evil bastard who was a political mastermind, who managed to dupe a nation into going along with a plan to exterminate an entire race of people — hell, he even duped the whole world until he invaded the wrong country. A lot of people waved him off because he was charismatic, and look where that got us all.

Whenever someone says Hitler was brilliant, they’re demonized, as if suggesting intelligence somehow equates ackowleding them as having moral superiority. No, someone can be brilliant and the most evil motherfucker you’ve ever met, or never met, like Hitler.

So, yeah, I think if this guy’s out there laughing it up and getting off of pretending to be oppressing women in what was clearly one of the most horrific acts of inhumanity ever committed against the human race, maybe, just maybe, it’s worth getting his motherfucking ass booted from his semi-political position.

And I feel kind of hypocritical for saying that since I think one of the greatest things about my country is that we do believe that what happens in Canadian’s bedrooms is their business.

But it’s kind of like Vegas: What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas… But god fuckin’ help ya if it don’t, baby. Mosley’s Vegas didn’t stay in Vegas. That’s his problem. Tough. And now we know, so somone needs to pay the price.

Methinks it’s the dude dressing up as a Nazi and whipping faux-Auschwitz girls, but that’s just me.

*What I resent, rather, is the fact that it gets so much press while the other horrific genocides of the past go largely unspoken. [Which is largely because Germany took its reparations above and beyond and has continued to repent for its sins of the past.] What other genocides do I mean? The Congo at the turn of the 19th century, more than 10 million Congo Africans butchered by the Belgians, but do we talk about that and how it fucked that part of the world until even now? The Congo has never healed. Read Adam Hochschild’s brilliant King Leopold’s Ghosts for a literary look at that. Or is there pressure to really, truly at last know how many of his fellow Chinese Chairman Mao ended/killed thanks to a government-induced Great Famine [from bad policies] and the Cultural Revolution or just sheer cruelty? They say between 5 million to 20 million. Fat chance the Chinese will let us at their records any time soon, ditto with the Russians and Stalin, for whom the total genocide numbers are still very unknown, but informed scholars guess around 10 million. Again, Adam Hochschild wrote a brilliant look at the post-Stalinist Russia and the ever-present lingering of Stalin’s legacy, when you could trust no one, in present-day Russia in Unquiet Ghosts: Russians Remember Stalin. Or there’s a great look at Stalin’s probable mind-fuck headset is in the novel Autobiography of Joseph Stalin, by Richard Lourie, which is dark but brilliant and well-researched though fiction.

I think it’s hypocritical that Israel has been so helped and aided by others post-Holocaust, and little has happened to really help the Congo, even now. (That said, I think it’s good that at least Israel and Germany are the only nations really willing to talk about their attrocities. They’ve both been incredibly open about it all, and the reparations seem to have shaped Germany as a country. I wish others would follow suit!) I just keep hoping press beyond Mother Jones and their ilk will force a discussion on how such things affect the psyche of a country at large, and how that perhaps affects its role in international relations. It’s big stuff but we never want to discuss it. Look at the penchance for violence in the Congo even today, where no one has ever really tried to heal the past — perhaps it’s because seeing their ancestors’ heads on stakes as a warning for what happens to those who don’t collect enough rubber sap has created a legacy of the lack of perceived value on human life. Who knows what effect the past had. But I think we need to find out, or we may run the risk of creating an enabling environment. Holy footnote, Batman.

They say that you can’t really take on an active lifestyle without eventually getting onboard with healthy eating, and I think I finally understand why.

This past month, I’ve eaten hardly any fresh food — it’s all been processed, easy, or guilt-laden. I’ve found myself craving chocolate bars, something that, despite my weight problem, isn’t something I go after all that much, but I have been in the last couple weeks.

Yesterday was supposed to be Day One of The Healthy-Eating Steff, but helping GayBoy paint his living room made that come undone as he proceeded to ply me full of Timmy’s donuts and beers and martinis. (I had a healthy dinner, though!)

I did, however, get a healthy plan in place for my week. I’m going for high-energy, high-fibre fresh foods. At least three or four meals this week will include my homemade (baked, not fried, and low in oil) falafels I made (along with homemade tzatziki sauce that kicks ass), and I’ve found other recipes I’ll try for funky Caribbean salads with grilled salmon and such. Everything is to be a well-rounded, high fibre, mostly “fresh” meals (versus all-cooked), with lots of beans and healthy proteins involved.

Eating properly will change everything. I’ve been getting too active for the shit I’ve been eating to give me fuel. Living a sedentary life and eating crap is fine, but as soon as you’re cycling 25 km in a day or hiking stairs daily, it’ll take you apart at the seams, which is what’s happened to me gradually over the last month, thanks to the painting and everything else I’ve done.

I’ve become too active to be tired by my activities, if that makes sense. I’m getting fit, strong, and my endurance is greater than ever…. yet, I’m constantly lethargic. Being malnourished is the only thing that explains this lethargy of mine, and I’m glad I’ve got a plan in place to change that around.

Lucky for me, it’s going to pour rain all week so I can’t cycle in to work (aw!) but this’ll get me full of energy for next week, when the sun makes a big return. Besides, I’ll be able to do my stairs in the rain, and this’ll give me a chance to buy and swap out the new bike seat I need.

So, bear with me, minions, as I start becoming myself again over the next couple of days. Yay for nutrition. Enjoy your Monday. 🙂

Sally Kern.

She did the one thing Nixon said not to do. Get caught. She’s not really sorry she flamed gays and lumped their sexual “preferences” in with evil like terrorism. I am not pleased.

I don’t tend to want to bring politics up too much. I think I’m putting that practice on hiatus right now. I think this is an important time with important issues, a time when we need important people to do important things.

We don’t need motherfucking hate-preaching political hacks like Kern taking up space in office when someone who really believes in the “land of the free” wants to do a stint of real public service, instituting change in a time when the public is demanding just that.

It’s time to really fucking think before we go ticking names off in elections. What do our candidates really, really think?

The Victory Fund is the GLBT organisation that outted Kern’s ridiculous hating speech– but they didn’t release her name. They issued this statement this week:

…Sally and her admirers [have] trotted out their favorite talking point—they don’t hate gay people, they love us and want us to change. Well, nobody who ever loved me talked to me the way she did when she compared us to terrorists and cancer. That’s not the language of love or even tough love. It’s the language of fear, division and yes, hate.

Across America, Sally and her friends in the anti-gay industry are backing narrow-minded, extremist candidates who want to implement her world view—a world in which gay people are encouraged to fake being straight or to simply disappear altogether. If you’re gay, or if you are related to or know people who are gay, you understand how dangerous and misguided that message is.

So my message back to Sally today is simple: Thanks, but no. We’re not going to stop listening to people like you. We’re not going to stop fighting to elect people who will stand up to people like you. We’re not going to apologize for living our lives honestly and with integrity, even if that doesn’t comport with your twisted views. It’s your right to say vicious things, but it’s our right to say you are dividing Oklahomans and Americans at a time when we most need to be united.

America’s a fractured country. So much infighting in recent years and finger-pointing led to no one noticing just how fucked up everything was getting. Now, America’s lost credibility the world over. A recession is in swing. Things are getting tricky. It’s time for people with solutions, not people trying to cause more problems.

The people over at evolvefish.com have a slogan: “Freedom is the distance between church and state.”

There’s a lot of lip service payed to the notion of church and state being separate in the US of A, but I really don’t see that when I see guys like Bush and Huckabee wearing their religious sentiment so prominently when seeking office, and vowing to vote with their conscience.

I have a sticker on my scooter. It says “The last time we combined politics with religion, people were burned at the stake.”

And I don’t get these people like Kern who claim their faith makes it kosher to hate. I don’t get how they think rejecting something at the core of a person and demanding they change, lie, or simply suppress it is not at all what I always thought the “Christian” thing to do was.

That’s hypocritical at its core. (I may not be religious but I am a profoundly ethical person. I’m even honest on my taxes. It’s crazy shit. Makes for good blogging. I have shame but I’m too honest to deflect it.)

But people like that, they give religious people a bad name. Sorry, but fundamentalists usually suck. Highly consistent. Besides, I can’t respect anyone who literally thinks the world was made in seven days. Fuck, it took me three weeks to paint my apartment, man. That these Creationists don’t think their “God” could be capable of creating a world so complex and interwoven that it would take millions of years to unravel all its gifts and mysteries is so fucking insulting that I can’t comprehend how obtuse someone would have to be to swallow such kindergarten drivel.

Haven’t any of these people heard of an “allegory” or “symbolism”? “Metaphor”? “Duh”?

[record scratches!] Holy tangent, Batman. Well, there you go. Sally Kern just inspires me.

And if you’re a Creationist and you’re all offended now, boo-fucking-hoo. Save your time, don’t tell me about it. I got arguments from here to fucking Timbuktu and I will never, ever be saved. I don’t even have a Costco membership, man. I pay full price. Sad, but true. “Save” someone else.

Readers, readers, readers… Give yourself the gift of democracy and end the careers of any ignorant motherfucker mistaking religious sentiment with what a free person should or should not be permitted to do.

Surfing, I found me this interesting little bitsy:

Chances are if someone were to ask you, right now, if you were happy, you’d say you were.^[1] Claiming that you’re happy—that is, to an interviewer who is asking you to rate your “life satisfaction” on a scale from zero to ten—appears to be nearly universal, as long as you’re not living in a war zone, on the street, or in extreme emotional or physical pain. The Maasai of Kenya, soccer moms of Scarsdale, the Amish, the Inughuit of Greenland, European businessmen—all report that they are happy. When happiness researcher Ed Diener, the past president of the International Society of Quality of Life Studies, synthesized 916 surveys of over a million people in forty-five countries, he found that, on average, people placed themselves at seven on the zero-to-ten scale.
-Sue Halpern, NYT Book Review

Yep. Happiness. What everyone is, but isn’t. Like we’re all really “fine” when we’re asked. “Just fucking ducky” doesn’t tend to go over so well, eh?

Me, I’d have said 5-6. Working on it, baby. But that was the whole thing. Last summer, I asked myself if I was happy. I said no. I quit my job. I lost 25 pounds. I’ve painted my apartment. And I’m still not happy. But I will be. 🙂

It’s funny, though, just an hour ago, towards the end of one of those Impromptu hang-outs with dear buddy GayBoy, and it’s nights like these I find myself hoping we always live 5 blocks apart, ‘cos… hey. It’s when the best hanging out happens: By accident.

So we were chatting as we checked out Facebook, and I pointed to a friend and go, “Sigh. Her.” “Sigh, Her” is currently in Memphis after being in Austin after having sold everything in this fair burg order to take off and jetset the world for X many months. She’s one of those people who goes everywhere, and when she travels, she meets everyone, has great experiences, takes awesome photos. She just lives one of those Rare lives. It’s awesome. But she’s able to be Of No Fixed Address and No Place To Hang Her Hat. Me, I need a home. She has her priorities, and I admire the fuck out of them, but I have mine.

I’m wistful when I see her reporting simple things like, it’s raining in Memphis. “Aw, that’s nice. Walk in it, baby.”

But GayBoy goes, “Oh, I hate people like her. I do! I fucking do! I hate people like her. They’re out there living that life, doing all that shit, and, yeah, I hate ’em. I know I’ve chosen this life, but that doesn’t mean I wouldn’t want that one, too. I mean, everyone wants what they don’t have. They do!”

Then he probably went on a little longer, but that’s pretty fuckin’ bang on there. (Later, he would point at Matt Damon the awesome Sarah Silverman/Matt Damon “I’m fucking Matt Damon” video and comment, “Doesn’t he make ya just wanna sit on his face?”)

So, is GayBoy right? Do we secretly always say Yeah, I’m Happy*. Like, we have an asterisk by “happy”, as if it’s reliant upon some complicated formula for quantifying it. Secretly, it’s THAT life we’d rather have right now, but all things considered, and this being the lesser of evils, well…

“Sure… I’m happy. Yeah, well, yeah, of course I’m happy. I mean… [chuckles awkwardly] …I chose this life, right? Sure! It’s exactly how I expected it… Precisely what I thought I’d be getting myself in– huh? Oh… uh, on a scale of ten? Oh, seven. What, honey? Eight, yeah, solidly eight. Yeah, coming!”

Dude comes jogging back after a beat.

“Make that a seven.”

Considering everything we have, are we happy? If we had to keep our heads grounded and our dreams in check, would we consider ourselves happy? Well, duh.

I think “seven” is bullshit. I suspect there’s a lot more 5s and 6s, if not lower, out there. People don’t want to admit the reality, that they’re unhappy, because then that’d mean they’d fucking well need to do something about it.

“Sure… I’m content. Content is the word. I wouldn’t say satisfied, but I’m happy– uh, I mean, content, with what I have.”

Right. That’s a seven on a real strong grading curve there, man.

If you could reach into a magical bag of friends, would you take exactly those you have now, no more, no less? If you could reach into a magical bag of jobs, would you sign up for yours again? Is your home a great home you’d take in a heartbeat given a do-over? If you could be mysteriously whisked off and confronted with a daydreaming version of you at 17, is who you are now the person you wanted be? Is it who you’ll be glad you were at the other end of your life? Will you, on your deathbed, wish like hell you could’ve said “No, this isn’t enough for me” and taken more for yourself?

If you would change things about your life, you are not all that happy. So, the question is, what are you getting out of lying about it?

That’s a whole ‘nother posting, isn’t it? Well, that’s all for this broadcast, batfans! Tune in for more exciting shenanigans next time, at the same bat time on the same bat channel!

PS: Oh, and, uh… if this posting has taken you rudely to the realization that happiness eludes you, then… um… April Fool’s?